``If you ever do find yourself working for a startup, here's a handy
tip for evaluating competitors. Read their job listings...

After a
couple years of this I could tell which companies to worry about
and which not to. The more of an IT flavor the job descriptions
had, the less dangerous the company was. The safest kind were the
ones that wanted Oracle experience. You never had to worry about
those. You were also safe if they said they wanted C++ or Java
developers. If they wanted Perl or Python programmers, that would
be a bit frightening -- that's starting to sound like a company
where the technical side, at least, is run by real hackers. If I
had ever seen a job posting looking for Lisp hackers, I would have
been really worried.''